Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

STREAMING O'FRANKEN. I've
been listening to a bit of The O'Franken Factor on Air America
Radio, which doesn't have an outlet in Boston but which is streaming
live here.
I can't judge it from 45 minutes of intermittent listening,
obviously, but while I had it on Michael Moore dropped by, and then
Al Gore called in to say hello.

Gore got off a funny, asking,
"How's the drug-free thing working out?" Moore made a crack about
OxyContin, and Al Franken chimed in, "We've been drug-free now for
two hours and 40 minutes." Maybe they're taking the wrong
drugs, because it seemed pretty low-energy. You'd think they'd be
bouncing off the walls on Day One.

Franken and Gore couldn't get Moore
to apologize for supporting Ralph Nader in 2000, but Moore did say
he's backing John Kerry this time around.

Air America has got to pick up a
Boston outlet before the conventions. You'd think this would be one
the best markets for liberal radio in the country. But with just
about every station with a decent signal locked down by a
conglomerate, that may not be easy.

Anyway ... the streaming works just
fine, and it's also on Channel 167 on XM Satellite Radio. As for the
rest of the country, stay tuned.

MONKEYS MAUL KERRY. Kerry
knew it was coming, but he hasn't been particularly effective in
warding off the flying
monkeys of the Bush-Cheney
campaign.

That's the conclusion of the
Washington Post's Dan Balz, who reports
today that "attacks on John
F. Kerry by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, backed by
millions of dollars in negative ads, have wiped out the narrow lead
Kerry enjoyed at the beginning of the month and damaged his public
image."

MORE IRAQI HORROR. The
images out of the Iraqi town of Fallujah today are horrifying and
sickening - the burned bodies (and body parts) of four Americans
being dragged through the streets, beaten with sticks, and hung up
for public display.

The New York Times, which
covers the story here,
has also posted an AP video
that you need an extraordinarily strong stomach to watch. If you read
this
AP story at Yahoo News,
you'll also find a slideshow that is nothing short of
appalling.

It will be interesting to see what
the media ethicists say about showing these images. Two years ago,
the Phoenix touched off a controversy when it published on its
Web site a link to a propaganda video made by the Islamist terrorists
who kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The
video ends with an image of Pearl's severed head being held aloft.
The paper also published two small images from the video, one of them
post-decapitation. Click
for what I wrote about it at the time.

The Phoenix got some
support, but also received a lot of criticism. Publishing gruesome
images is always controversial, and should never be done without a
great deal of thought. The question is, are the pictures from
Fallujah somehow newsworthy in a way that the Pearl images were not?
And, if so, what is the standard?

And just in case you were wondering: I think they were both newsworthy. We shouldn't be forced to watch such images, but neither should we hide from them.

Monday, March 29, 2004

WHITE DEATH.Here
was the story of the weekend - Ken Holmes, a 37-year-old father of
five, hiked into the Pemigewasset Wilderness on January 12 and froze
to death. Garry Harrington's piece in the Boston Globe
Magazine portrays a man who was in excellent physical condition,
who packed plenty of cold-weather gear, but who nevertheless had an
exceedingly cavalier attitude about how quickly conditions can turn
life-threatening in New Hampshire's White Mountains.

I have my own memories of the Pemi.
In November 1987 my friend Brad and I set out on what we hoped would
be a three-day trip. It soon started snowing, and we ended up camping
right in the middle of the trail, with the snow piling up and the
temperature dropping into single digits. We couldn't get our
backpacking stove to light, so we ended up eating granola bars and
huddling in our sleeping bags. We clambered up the summit of
Owl's
Head the next morning and
then bugged out.

Eleven years later we were back,
hiking in a steady, at times heavy, rain over Columbus Day Weekend.
We camped out the first night. The second night, after making our way
over the summits of Bondcliff,
Bond,
West
Bond, and Zealand,
we talked our way into Zealand
Falls Hut, which had been
booked to capacity but had some vacancies because of the weather.
Zealand is open year-round. If Holmes had made it there, Harrington
notes, it might have saved his life.

In August 2001 I took my son, Tim,
and his friend Troy, then both 10, up to Galehead
Hut for their first
extended hiking experience. Accompanying Harrington's article is a
photo of Holmes's backpack in front of Galehead. I've got a picture of
Tim, Troy, and me taken in more or less that very spot.

For those of us who love the White
Mountains, Harrington's story was both a thriller and a cautionary
tale.

HOW DID KELLEY DO IT? "It's
like medical malpractice - doctors don't turn one another in." Howard
Kurtz offers
some insights in this
morning's Washington Post into how former USA Today
reporter Jack Kelley got away with it for so long.

Friday, March 26, 2004

BARNICLE APOLOGIZES.Boston Herald columnist Mike Barnicle today apologized on his
WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) program for using the word "Mandingo" on Tuesday
in referring to the marriage of former secretary of defense William
Cohen, who's white, and former Boston television news personality
Janet Langhart, who's black.

I didn't hear the original
reference on Tuesday. This morning, though, Barnicle said he was
referring to an old movie of that name about the marriage of a white
man and a black woman, that he's friends with Langhart and knows
Cohen slightly, and that he meant no offense.

The only film I could find at the
Internet
Movie Database called
Mandingo was this
one, made in 1975.
According to the description, "A slave owner in the 1840s trains one
of his slaves to be a bare-knuckle fighter, unaware that his wife is
demanding from his champion services of a different kind." Not quite
the same thing. And check out this user comment:

Like titillating porn,
Mandingo is the kind of film you rent and hope no one you
know is looking. Then you hurry home, lower the blinds, make sure
the kids are in bed, then turn on the VCR in anticipation. This
film is so politically incorrect it's worth it on that merit
alone! Black and white stereotypes are played up to the hilt and
everybody is running around "pleasuring" any thing that
moves.

Nice! Well, maybe Barnicle was
thinking of another movie called Mandingo. Is there
one?

Anyway, Media Log's instant
analysis is that Barnicle was an idiot to toss off a racially charged
term like "Mandingo" (which he essentially acknowledged); that he's a
recidivist (he recently referred to an Iranian actress and an
African-born actor as "terrorists");
but that his apology at least puts him ahead of his 'TKK colleague
Jay Severin, who uses terms like "wetback" and "towelhead"
without consequence.

We'll be kicking this around later
today on Greater
Boston, on WGBH-TV
(Channel 2) at 7 p.m.

CLOSED QUARTERS. Jack Wilson
might prove that he's a terrific choice as the new president of
UMass, but the process, or lack thereof, reeked. Boston Globe
columnist Scot
Lehigh explains
why.

Thursday, March 25, 2004

THE COMEBACK KID. Mark
Shanahan has a good piece
on David Brudnoy in today's Globe. Brudnoy, who's recovering
from cancer, returned to his talk-show perch at WBZ Radio (AM 1030)
this week. The Boston Herald's Marie Szaniszlo
wrote
about Brudnoy's first night back on Tuesday, as did Herald
columnist Mike
Barnicle (sub.
req.).

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

REPORTER CONTRACTS TB.Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden writes today that
among the things he brought home from Iraq was an asymptomatic case
of tuberculosis.
He writes:

My biggest concern is
getting the word out to professionals now traveling to the region,
thanks to our ongoing wars and occupation of highly infected
areas. You need to be tested. The colleagues I've spoken to were
unaware of the risk.

REMOVAL WITHOUT A CAUSE. Let's
see if I've got this straight. NPR's Morning Edition has some
13 million weekly listeners, putting it in the same ballpark as Rush
Limbaugh and Howard Stern. Its audience is up 41
percent in the past five
years, according to NPR's own numbers. And the host since 1979, Bob
Edwards, has been pushed out, with no replacement having yet been
named.

Edwards tells the Washington
Post that he blames
Jay Kernis, NPR's senior vice-president for programming, saying, "I
think it's a style thing. I think he's tired of listening to me."
Well, that makes about as much sense as anything else, unless there
was something going on behind the scenes that we don't know
about.

Nothing lasts forever, of course.
But Edwards is still only 56. NPR's drive-time newscasts, Morning
Edition and All Things Considered, though not perfect, are
by far the best broadcast news programs on the air - far better than
PBS's wretched NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

The only good news to offset this
announcement is that William
Marimow, a former editor of
the Baltimore Sun, has been named to a top position at NPR.
Marimow is a Pulitzer winner and a respected journalist, so Edwards's
removal shouldn't be seen as a sign that NPR is lowering its
standards.

What it is a sign of
remains, at this point, impossible to say.

SMEARING CLARKE.Josh
Marshall is keeping track
of the Republican smear campaign against former counter-terrorism
official Richard Clarke.

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

FOX AND CNN: WHO'S WATCHING?
According to a new report by Fairness
& Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR), the notion that the Fox News Channel is trouncing CNN in the
ratings is one of those received pieces of conventional wisdom that
doesn't hold up when you look at the facts.

The report,
by FAIR's Steve Rendall, finds that Fox's lead is in the "share" -
that is, how many viewers are watching at any given time. By
contrast, CNN holds a wide lead in the "cume," which measures how
many viewers tune in for at least six minutes a day. Because CNN
emphasizes news and Fox's programming consists mainly of
opinion-driven talk shows, viewers tend to stick with CNN for a
shorter period than Fox watchers - but there are many more of
them.

How dramatic is the difference
between the two measurements? Rendall writes:

CNN regularly claims a
cume about 20 percent higher than Fox's (Deseret Morning
News, 1/12/04). For instance, in April 2003, during the height
of the fighting in Iraq, CNN's cume was significantly higher than
Fox's: 105 million viewers tuned into CNN compared to 86 million
for Fox (Cablefax, 4/30/03). But in the same period, the
ratings reported by most media outlets had Fox in the lead, with
an average of 3.5 million viewers to CNN's 2.2 million.

As it turns out, these "lighter"
viewers are more valuable to advertisers than the folks who sit
inertly through The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity &
Colmes, and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren for hour
after hour. That's because showing viewers the same commercials over
and over is less cost-effective than hitting channel-surfers once or
twice. Thus CNN is able to charge higher advertising rates than Fox
even though its audience share is smaller. Then there's
this:

Interviewed in
MediaWeek last year (2/10/04), media business analyst Larry
Blasius suggested that snob appeal was part of the reason that he
didn't think Fox would soon catch CNN in the race for ad dollars
(MediaWeek, 2/10/04): "There are two kinds of news
advertisers. If you're talking cold remedies, you're buying
eyeballs. Others are looking for an environment, an image. They're
looking to reach decision-makers and influencers who watch news.
If you're an image-oriented product - a BMW, Mercedes, Lexus -
it's not even a question, you go with CNN. There's no comparison
in the quality of the journalism - CNN is light years ahead in
objectivity and reporting - and I don't think Fox's 'New York
Post on TV' approach appeals to the most desirable
consumers."

Why is this important? There have
been times over the past few years when CNN executives have sought to
emulate Fox - not nearly to the degree as the desperadoes at MSNBC,
but certainly there is more talk and less news at CNN than there was,
say, 10 years ago. FAIR's report shows that aping Fox is not just bad
journalism, it's bad business as well.

Monday, March 22, 2004

HERALD EXODUS
CONTINUES. Two more familiar bylines will soon be disappearing.
Investigative reporter Jonathan Wells, a veteran of CBS's 60
Minutes, gave his notice at the Boston Herald today. He's
leaving to become executive producer of the investigative unit at
WFXT-TV (Channel 25), known as "Fox
25 Undercover." The unit
comprises an on-air reporter, Mike Beaudet; the executive producer's
slot that Wells just took; and a producer's position that Wells will
be filling. You can bet the résumés are flying between
Wingo Square and Channel 25's Dedham headquarters.

Media Log has also learned that
City Hall reporter Ellen Silberman will be leaving to take a job with
state inspector general Gregory Sullivan. Silberman was unable to
talk when I reached her, but she did confirm the pending
move.

"It's a combination of things,"
Wells told me when I asked him why he was leaving the Herald.
"The most important reason is that I had planned at some point in the
near future to try to go back into television, and this was a good
opportunity to do it, and to do it in Boston."

Wells declined to discuss the
ongoing turmoil at the Herald, but there has been plenty. In
recent weeks editor Andy Costello was removed, managing editor Andrew
Gully announced he would be leaving no later than June, and Mike
Barnicle - who lost his column at the Boston Globe in 1998 in
part because the Herald revealed he'd lifted one-liners from a
George Carlin book - was hired, to considerable newsroom
consternation.

Wells worked at the Herald
for six years before moving to 60 Minutes in 1993. He returned
to Boston in 1999, and ended up back at the Herald after the
Globe proved to be reluctant to bring him aboard.

The two Herald stories Wells
says he's proudest of are the paper's post-9/11 coverage of ties
between Saudi Arabia and both the Clinton and Bush White Houses, and
a series from last year (with recent
follow-ups) of possible
ties between the Islamic Society of Boston and several people who may
had dealings with terrorists.

Update: Ellen Silberman
checks in to say that she's leaving for reasons other than the
turmoil that's hit the Herald newsroom. "I've been at the
Herald for six years," she says. "I don't want to go the
Globe. And I would like to make decent money at some point in
my life. So this seemed like a good opportunity. The timing is
largely coincidental. It happens to be a moment of uncertainty at the
Herald." She adds: "It's not like I'm a rat leaving a sinking
ship. That's not where I'm at. It's more money, it's better hours,
and it's a new challenge."

Silberman will leave the
Herald in early April and begin working at the IG's office at
the end of the month. She adds that she'll be helping with
investigations, not press.

BRUDNOY'S BACK TONIGHT. The
talk-radio legend will be behind the mike from 7 to 10 p.m. on WBZ
Radio (AM 1030).

TRASHING CLARKE. The
reductive bullet point that's been attached to former White House
anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke's critique of the Bush White
House is that he's blaming George W. Bush for 9/11. The
conservatives particularly like this ("Behind the Effort to Blame
Bush for September 11," reads the subhead of a Wall Street
Journaleditorial
today) because the notion is ridiculous, and thus easily swatted
aside.

The truth is that even though the
terrorist attacks could have been anticipated as one of many possible
scenarios involving Al Qaeda, the chances of stopping those
particular attacks on that particular day were minimal.

Thus, what's really disturbing
about Clarke's brief - laid out in an interview with 60
Minutes last night - is not that Bush could have stopped it.
Rather, it is that Bush and his administration dropped the intense
focus that the Clinton White House had given Al Qaeda, and that, as
soon as the attacks occurred, the Bushies immediately pressed for
evidence of a non-existent link with Iraq.

"The president dragged me
into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and
said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never
said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in
absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a
report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've
done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it
with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said,
"Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very
intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that
answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a
serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA
experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and
found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared
the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced
by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and
sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if
the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to
the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around
the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees
memos that he doesn't - wouldn't like the answer."

The right, of course, is already
trying to discredit Clarke as a partisan warrior - never mind the
fact that he worked not just for Clinton but also for Ronald Reagan,
George H.W. Bush, and, until recently, George W. Then, too, Clarke is
out pushing a new book, which I guess we're supposed to take as some
sign of moral turpitude.

But as Josh Marshall
notes
today, what's really interesting about this is how at odds Clarke's
account is with that of national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Given Rice's dubious reputation for veracity, I'd say Clarke ought to
be taken very seriously.

A NEW BOSTON BLOG. The
Boston Herald has started something called the
"Road
to Boston Blog." Written
(so far) by political reporter David Guarino, the blog began with a
"soft launch" Friday. This is the first official Herald blog -
business reporter Jay
Fitzgerald and columnist
Cosmo
Macero have been blogging
for a while, but they do it on their own websites.

The Boston Globe is taking a
different approach, with op-ed
columnists writing Web-only
pieces once a month.

Friday, March 19, 2004

EYE WITNESS NEWS. So I'm
reading bits and pieces of USA Today's account of former
reporter Jack Kelley's literally incredible fabrications. It took me
a while, but finally I got it: what the paper describes as
"[p]erhaps the most riveting story Jack Kelley wrote" was
also something that his editors had doubts about all
along.

The story involved a suicide
bombing that took place in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001. The
deconstruction
that USA Today publishes today is worth reading in full. But
check out this paragraph:

Kelley could not have seen
three men decapitated. He wrote in his story: "Three men, who had
been eating pizza inside, were catapulted out of the chairs they
had been sitting on. When they hit the ground, their heads
separated from their bodies and rolled down the street." In a
first draft that Kelley submitted for publication, he wrote that
some of the heads rolled "with their eyes still
blinking."

This is an astounding detail. No
editor in his or her right mind would take it out. Except, possibly,
for one reason: a suspicion that it wasn't true, that Kelley
hadn't actually witnessed such a horrifying event. So what did
the editors do? They removed the most compelling - and most obviously
fabricated - detail, and left the rest of the story pretty much
alone.

USA Today deserves credit
for coming clean about Kelley. But there remains much that hasn't yet
been reported about the culture that allowed him to thrive.

THE "H" WORD. Cynthia
Cotts's new Village Voice column has some good dirt on
The
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
(Motto: Speaking Pablum to Power!) Apparently Lehrer got very upset
when a guest said something naughty about Halliburton. Read Cotts's
column here.

Fairness & Accuracy in
Reporting has some
choice words for Lehrer's
suck-up performance as well.

And here's some unsolicited advice
for John Kerry: do not, under any circumstances, let Lehrer moderate
this year's presidential debates. As Jack Beatty explains,
Lehrer's unthinking even-handedness helped put George W. Bush in the
White House four years ago.

UNFREE PRESS. A major
press-freedom case is under way in Providence, where Jim Taricani, an
investigative reporter for Channel 10, has been ordered to pay a
$1000-a-day fine for refusing to say who gave him an undercover
videotape from the investigation of former mayor Buddy Cianci, who's
now serving time.

According to today's
Providence Journal
(reg. req.), the feds are seeking to have the fines kick in
immediately, before Taricani has even exhausted all of his
appeals.

This isn't exactly a First
Amendment case; reporters have no more right to protect the
identities of those they do business with than an ordinary citizen
does. Nevertheless, this amounts to federal harassment of a reporter
who was doing his job.

FLEET OF MOUTH. Look, I
don't want the Democratic National Convention to be held at the
FleetCenter. Neither do you. The South Boston convention center makes
all kind of sense. But it's March, and it's not going to happen.
Which is why this
item on the Romney Is a
Fraud weblog is so dead-on.

The convention has been in the
works for years now. It is cynical and ridiculous for Governor Mitt
Romney to jump on the South Boston bandwagon now.

The Boston Herald's Cosmo
Macero (sub. req.), who first floated this idea in December, hasn't
quite given up on it yet - although even
he admits, "It may in fact
be too late, and too costly, to do anything now but hope for the best
at the Fleet."

For Romney, though, it's not too
late to score some cheap points by getting behind a plan that doesn't
exist.

MARRIED WITH CONFLICTS.
Should a newspaper allow a married same-sex couple to keep covering
the gay-marriage debate? It's a hard question, but Media Log's view
is that it depends on the circumstances of the couple's
marriage.

The San Francisco Chronicle
decided earlier this week that reporter Rachel Gordon and
photographer Liz Mangelsdorf could no longer cover the issue after
they got married at City Hall. Here
is editor Phil Bronstein's memo to the staff (via Romenesko).

This is a very, very tough call,
but I think Bronstein was right. The San Francisco marriages weren't
just marriages (though they were surely that); they were also acts of
civil disobedience by the mayor, Gavin Newsom. Newsom did a fine
thing by challenging state officials to recognize gay and lesbian
couples as being equal in the eyes of the law and the state
constitution. But for journalists to get married under such
circumstances and then continue to cover the story would be the
equivalent of carrying signs and shouting slogans at a demonstration
that they had been assigned to report on.

Here's the difference. If Gordon
and Mangelsdorf had waited and flown to Boston on May 18 to get
married, then no one would have had a right to complain. They would
have been legally married in accordance with the state Supreme
Judicial Court's Goodridge decision, and there would have been
no political overtones to their exchanging vows.

But that's not what they did. They
took part in a political act, and now they should sit it out, at
least in terms of offering straight news coverage. (No harm in
offering something more personal, with the appropriate
disclosure.)

DONALD RUMSFELD, LYING LIAR.
And in this
ad by MoveOn.org, his pants
are on fire. (Thanks to Michael Goldman.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. "It is
absolutely ridiculous and unfair and a stretch. Tell them to come to
me and ask me about it and look me in the eye. I'll straighten them
out in good force - the yellow, rotten, dirty [expletives]
that they are. I commend Tim Cahill for looking beyond the political
and not falling for the [expletive] disgrace of caving in and
punishing a kid who deserves something." - State Auditor
Joe
DeNucci, in today's
Boston Herald, which reports that State Treasurer Tim Cahill
has promoted his son-in-law.

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S
PHOENIX. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum comes
thisclose to saying that John Kerry is Osama
bin Laden's candidate for
president.

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

DEMS STAY PUT. With the
logistical nightmare posed by holding the Democratic National
Convention at the FleetCenter becoming more and more apparent,
Governor Mitt Romney has lent his voice to those saying that the
gathering should be moving to the new convention center in South
Boston. (Globe coverage here;
Herald coverage here.)

Given that it's almost certainly
too late to make such a dramatic shift, it's worth reminding everyone
that the idea was publicly floated for
the first time last
December 19, in Cosmo Macero's Herald column.

Macero's money graf:

"If we got the call from
the mayor or the committee ... I believe we could do it," says Jim
Rooney, chief executive of the Massachusetts Convention Center
Authority and Menino's one-time chief of staff. "It would look
different. But it could and would be made to look like a good
media event, which is by and large what conventions are."

The traffic and security concerns
would be so much more easily solved at the desolate South Boston
location than at the FleetCenter, which is the hub of the Greater
Boston's public-transportation network as well as the nexus of the
city's highway system.

But, of course, the move isn't
going to happen. All we can do is hope for the best.

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

WHAT KERRY SAID. You've got
to feel sorry this morning for Boston Globe reporter Patrick
Healy. It was his transcription of a March 8 speech by John Kerry at
a fundraising event that led to a week of controversy over the
senator's alleged assertion that "foreign leaders" had told him they
hoped he would beat George W. Bush. Healy was the pool reporter,
which means that the entire media relied on his transcript. And now
it turns out that mistakes
were made.

It was an easy mistake to make, and
I'm sure Healy is unhappy about it - make that very unhappy.
The larger question is whether the corrected transcript changes the
meaning of what Kerry said. I don't think it does. But unfortunately,
and characteristically, the Kerry campaign is using the error to back
away from this mini-controversy.

A Globe reporter was
present for the fund-raiser as a representative of the newspapers
covering the campaign. The reporter initially sent out a report to
his colleagues saying that Kerry had told the crowd, "I've met
foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly but, boy,
they look at you and say, 'You gotta win this, you gotta beat this
guy, we need a new policy' - things like that."

Yesterday the reporter listened
again to the tape, previously transcribed on a bus and campaign
airplane, and said Kerry actually said: "I've been hearing it,
I'll tell ya. The news, the coverage in other countries, the news
in other places. I've met more leaders who can't go out and say it
all publicly but, boy, they look at you and say, 'You gotta win
this, you gotta beat this guy, we need a new policy' - things like
that."

Kerry never used the term
"foreign" or, as some accounts have reported, said he had "met
with" foreign leaders. His comments were preceded by a statement
from Milton Ferrell, Kerry's Florida fund-raising chairman,
voicing foreign displeasure with the current president. Ferrell
said, "Europeans and elsewhere, they're counting on the American
people. They hate Bush, but they know we're going to get rid of
him."

Based on that context, I'd say that
Healy got Kerry's meaning right, even if he didn't capture his exact
words. But the Los Angeles Timesreports
today that the Kerry campaign is now trying to back away from the
controversy. Matea Gold writes:

[T]he campaign
said Monday that the Globe's clarification demonstrates some
ambiguity about what Kerry meant. His reference to "more leaders,"
said Kerry's spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter, "could mean anybody."
The media's repeated references to "foreign leaders" allowed
critics to suggest he was talking about heads of state. "He was
misquoted," said Cutter. "Had he not been misquoted, this wouldn't
be a story."

Really? Kerry has been pounded at
over this miniature issue. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who
doesn't normally get involved in partisan politics, challenged
Kerry to name the foreign
leaders he'd supposedly met with who support his candidacy. Yet Kerry
did not really contest the accuracy of Healy's transcript, at least
not until Sunday - and then, according to this
account in the New York
Times, he challenged something that Healy actually got
right:

Mr. Kerry said on Sunday
that he had used the word "heard," not "met," prompting Mr. Healy
to revisit the recording. On Monday, he sent out a corrected
transcript, clarifying that the quotation actually began, "I've
met more leaders who can't go out and say it all publicly."

Here's what White House spokeswoman
Suzy DeFrancis told the LA Times:

The White House, when
asked about the Globe reporter's clarification of the original
remarks, said Kerry should have denounced the reported comments
earlier if he had been misquoted.

"It seems to us that Sen. Kerry
has affirmed the quote by his own reaction to it," said Suzy
DeFrancis, a White House spokeswoman." He's had plenty of time to
disavow it if he didn't agree with it so I think he was
clearly probably describing foreign leaders."

I can't disagree.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. "Al
Sharpton yesterday conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to
John F. Kerry ... He now says he is close to signing a contract to
host a radio or cable television talk show." - Boston
Globe,
3/16/04

Monday, March 15, 2004

MIKE BARNICLE, MEDIA CRITIC.
In the New York Daily News, Barnicle weighs
in on the New York
Post front-page photo
of a young woman leaping to her death. (Via Romenesko.)
Here
is Post chief copy editor Barry Gross's defense. So help me, I
agree with Barnicle. This was a suicide, with no larger implications
that would warrant running the picture. But what's Barnicle going to
say the first time the Boston Herald runs a photo like
that?

SPAIN SAYS NO. The terrorist
attack in Spain, and the subsequent victory
of the opposition Socialist Party, defy easy analysis. My thoughts
are completely conflicted. (Which is why I recommend this
New York Times Magazine essay
by the Kennedy School's Michael Ignatieff, a liberal supporter of the
war in Iraq.)

On the one hand, I believe George
W. Bush's decision to go to war on Iraq was ill-considered. There
were no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence that Saddam
Hussein's government was tied to Al Qaeda. In light of that, Spanish
prime minister Jose Maria Aznar's decision to support Bush's war
against the wishes of 90 percent of his own people amounted to
courage uninformed by judgment.

On the other hand, the Spanish
public, by flipping from Aznar's Popular Party to the Socialists
almost overnight, may very well have sent a signal to Al Qaeda about
how easily they can be swayed by a terrorist attack. Incoming prime
minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero says he'll pull Spanish troops
out of Iraq as soon as possible, and who can blame him? They
shouldn't have been there in the first place. But I'm afraid that he
- and the voters who just put him in office - are doing the right
thing for the wrong reason.

At such a time of uncertainty, it
can at least be helpful to find someone with whom to disagree. Andrew
Sullivan today offers the insulting headline "Bin
Laden's Victory in Spain."
What follows is only slightly more nuanced.

What Sullivan and his ilk don't
seem to get is that the way Saddam was removed was every bit
as important as the fact that he was removed. Saddam was one
of the most evil dictators of our time (though a piker compared to
the guy with the hair in North Korea), and the people of Iraq are
far, far better off without him.

But by arrogantly swaggering in
without the support of the United Nations and with phonied-up
evidence of Iraq's weapons capabilities, Bush and his handful of
friends have created a mess that may take a generation to clean
up.

Sullivan's right about one thing:
Britain is the next logical target.

THE GOD OF REAL ESTATE. If
you didn't read Kevin Cullen's page-one story in yesterday's
Boston Globe about ex-gangster Eddie MacKenzie's virtual
takeover of a small Beacon Hill church, click
here.

It is, as they say in the business,
a "holy shit" story.

PUBLIC RELIGIOSITY. I'll be
moderating a Ford Hall Forum discussion on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. on
"Prayer
in Public." The panelists
will be Ellen Band, an artist and the creator of Portal of
Prayer, a sound-based work of public art; Wendy Kaminer, a
prominent civil libertarian and writer; and Victor H. Kazanjian, Jr.,
dean of religious and spiritual life at Wellesley College.

Friday, March 12, 2004

DELAY, DECEIVE - AND
SELF-DESTRUCT?Salon today leads with a long
piece
by veteran Texas journalist Lou Dubose on an investigation into House
majority leader Tom DeLay's vaunted fundraising machine. This is
potentially devastating stuff - though Dubose thinks DeLay himself is
unlikely to be the target of any criminal probe, this could be
embarrassing enough that it makes him a serious liability to the
national Republican Party.

As Dubose observes,
campaign-finance laws in Texas are so loose that you really have to
work hard to run afoul of them. What Travis County district attorney
Ronnie Earle is investigating is whether the DeLay machine - which
funds Republican candidates all over Texas - violated a law against
spending corporate money directly on election campaigns.

Naturally, the Republicans are
responding by trying to pass a state law prohibiting Earle from
investigating political corruption.

MUSH FROM THE WIMPS.National Journal media critic William Powers pokes
fun at Boston Globe
ombudsman Christine Chinlund for agonizing
over a recent Pat Oliphant cartoon that struck some readers as
anti-Catholic. (Via Romenesko.)

And now some mush from this
wimp: I think I'm more with Chinlund and editorial-page editor
Renée Loth than I am with Powers on this. Cruelty in
cartooning can be great, but Oliphant's was gratuitous. Yes, I
laughed, but I'm not a Catholic.

THE STATE OF GAY MARRIAGE.
The Phoenix's Kristen Lombardi argues
that yesterday's action by the constitutional convention - pushing
forward an amendment to ban gay marriage but to create civil unions -
is actually a huge step forward for the gay-and-lesbian civil-rights
movement.

Thursday, March 11, 2004

"MUHAMMAD HORTON." As Media
Log is wont to say, you can't make this stuff up. One of the
new Bush-Cheney ads, titled "100 Days," accuses John Kerry of being
soft on terrorism - and it uses the image of a shifty,
swarthy-looking man, obviously meant to evoke an Arab, to drive the
fear home. Watch it here.

NEW YORK OBSERVER NAMES
MEDIA CRITIC.Washington City Paper senior editor Tom
Scocca has been picked by the New
York Observer to
replace media critic Sridhar Pappu, who recently left to become a
staff writer at Sports Illustrated. Scocca, who was a feature
writer at the Boston Phoenix in the mid 1990s, is the
co-creator of "Funny
Paper," an arch take on the
world of comics.

Scocca e-mails Media Log: "I'd
better start writing the column before I start talking about
it."He plans to move to New
York at some point after he wraps up his duties at the City Paper. He
can be reached at tjscocca@mindspring.com.

Oddly enough, Pappu is a former
City Paper intern. For that matter, Slate media critic
Jack Shafer and New York Times media reporter David Carr are
City Paper alumni; City Paper founder Russ Smith writes
media criticism for the New York Press (which he founded and
has since sold) and, occasionally, the Wall Street Journal.
Another former City Paper intern, Josh Levin, writes the
magazines column for Slate.

SALON UPS THE ANTE.
One of the more heartening media developments of the past year is the
revival of Salon,
the pioneering webzine that downsized and struggled through the
dot-com bust. With new funding in place, Salon is now opening
a revived Washington bureau, to be headed by none other than Sidney
Blumenthal, ex of the Phoenix, the New Yorker, and the
Clinton White House.

Salon is also publishing
excerpts from a new book by former Boston magazine editor
Craig Unger called House of Bush, House of Saud, and is
partnering with MoveOn.org,
the London Guardian,
and the new liberal radio network, Air America.

Salon and Slate
are the two big survivors of the mid-'90s new-media boom. With
Slate occupying much the same neolib-cum-neocon ground
as the New
Republic,
Salon's renewed relevance is welcome news to everyone on the
left side of the political spectrum.

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S
PHOENIX. The battle against broadcast indecency has media
moguls running
scared, as they are all too
willing to sacrifice free speech on the altar of corporate
empire-building.

Also, for the past six years, one
of the Boston Herald's favorite targets was Mike
Barnicle. Until now, that
is.

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

BLOGGING AT THE
GLOBE. Well, not quite. But the paper is cautiously
starting to offer Web-exclusive content from some of its marquee
names. Here
is an online column by Scot Lehigh, posted yesterday, on the
vice-presidential sweepstakes. Here
is one from Tom Oliphant, posted last Thursday, on how John Edwards
made John Kerry a better candidate.

This is definitely a step forward,
but I'd say the Globe has a way to go. The Lehigh and Oliphant
dispatches read exactly like their print columns. Maybe there's a
case to be made for that, but, in general, Internet content works
best when its shorter, faster, and looser (in tone, not with the
facts) than what's available in print.

It would also help if this stuff
were easier to find. As best as I can tell, the only way to look up
Web-only political commentary is to follow
this link, and then scan
down for the magic words "Web Exclusive."

A LESS-THAN-EARTH-SHATTERING
CHANGE. A few people have asked me why I haven't written yet
about the redesigned Boston Globe Magazine. Partly it's
because I want to see a few issues before I try to make an
assessment. Partly it's because the redesign wasn't quite as dramatic
as it could have been.

It looks nice, and there's a lot of
new, short, consumer-and-advertiser-friendly stuff at the front of
the book, which was predictable. Dave Barry is still there, so I'm
happy. It's bigger, and bigger is better, especially in an era when
other major metros have canceled their Sunday magazines. That's all
to the good. But it will never be as influential (or controversial)
as the New York Times Magazine. And I have no doubt that the
Globe's best journalism will continue to be reserved for the
paper, not the magazine.

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

THE AGELESS DANIEL DAMON.
Last October 31, Boston Herald reporter Tom Farmer wrote about
Peter Damon, an Army sergeant from Brockton who lost both hands in
Iraq when a helicopter tire he was working on accidentally blew up.
Farmer reported that Damon and his then-girlfriend (now wife),
Jennifer Maunus, had two children - "Allura, 6, and Daniel, 18
months."

On November 27, the Herald's
Jessica Heslam did a follow-up, reporting again that the couple's
children were "Allura, 6, and Daniel, 18 months." Scientists are not
sure why Daniel Damon did not get a month older in a month's
time.

Then, today, on the front page of
the Herald, brand-spankin'-new columnist Mike Barnicle
wrote
(sub. req.) in his debut that the now-married Damons are the parents
of "a daughter 6 and a boy, 19 months."

Obviously someone is wrong, and
it's not necessarily Barnicle - although, for obvious reasons, he is
the one who's being watched the most carefully. The Herald
needs to run a correction. And I'm curious, to say the least, as to
whose reporting gets corrected.

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT
HISTORY. To read the coverage of Barnicle's return to the Boston
newspaper wars, you'd think the only things he'd ever done wrong were
to rip off a few lines from George Carlin and to write a column about
kids with cancer without checking his sources all that
carefully.

Barnicle has been writing a column
for the New York Daily News for five years now with no
apparent incident, and it's unfair to bear the guy ceaselessly back
into the past (that's, ahem, a semi-literate reference to F. Scott
Fitzgerald). But let's not gloss over the past. Barnicle had been
credibly accused of plagiarism on several occasions during his
quarter-century career at the Boston Globe - including by the
late, great Mike Royko. Barnicle attributed a racial slur to Harvard
Law professor Alan Dershowitz (no witnesses, naturally) after
Dershowitz dared to criticize Barnicle's buddy Bill Bulger. (The
Globe ended up paying a settlement.) And, in the early 1990s,
Boston magazine turned up a number of columns that appeared to
be partly or wholly fabricated. You can read all about it
here.

After Globe columnist
Patricia Smith was forced out for fabricating characters and quotes
in June 1998, the end came quickly for Barnicle. In July, my friend
Bill Kirtz, a journalism professor at Northeastern University,
reported in the Quill, the magazine of the Society of
Professional Journalists, that Barnicle had once plagiarized from
A.J. Liebling. Then the Herald reported the Carlin incident,
which led to a suspension and a nationwide campaign among Barnicle's
media buddies to save his job.

Finally, I reported on Kirtz's
allegations, digging up evidence showing that, in a 1986 column,
Barnicle had apparently lifted direct quotes, complete with
idiosyncratic spelling, from Liebling's 1961 biography of Louisiana
politico Earl Long, The Earl of Louisiana. An advance copy of
that
story was released to the
local and national media early in the afternoon on August 19. Within
a few hours, Barnicle was gone, with the Globe announcing that
it had uncovered yet another instance of journalistic malfeasance: a
column about kids with cancer that appeared to be partly or wholly
fabricated.

Barnicle deserves to be judged on
his current work, not what he did six or 18 years ago. But let's get
the record straight, shall we?

By the way, here
is a worthwhile piece by Kirtz on his own 15 minutes of fame as the
man who discovered the Barnicle-Liebling connection.

Monday, March 08, 2004

HERALD UNION CRITICIZES
BARNICLE HIRING. This just in (1:13 P.M. UPDATE - This is a slightly revised version of the Guild's earlier statement):

This announcement comes as
an obvious shock and disappointment to Guild-represented Herald
staffers dedicated to upholding the highest possible journalism
standards while competing to keep the Herald a viable daily in a
tough two-newspaper town. It wasn't long ago that the Herald took
an aggressive role in helping expose the numerous transgressions -
among them plagiarism and fabrication - that led to Mike
Barnicle's rightful banishment from the Globe. We have great
respect for Publisher Pat Purcell and Editorial Director Ken
Chandler, but as hard-working Guild staffers we cannot remain
silent in the face of such a troubling decision.

BUSH'S 9/11 COMMERCIAL.
Uncharacteristically, Media Log has been unable to muster any outrage
over George W. Bush's use of 9/11 imagery in his first round of TV
commercials. I'll read something from someone who thinks it's no big
deal - like John
Ellis - and find myself
agreeing with him. Then I'll read something on the
other side, and end up
agreeing with that, too.

The ad is titled "Safer, Stronger,"
and you can watch it at the Bush-Cheney '04 website.
As far as I can tell, the only objectionable part is a very short
scene - so short you'll miss it if you blink - of a flag-draped
stretcher being carried out of the wreckage of the World Trade
Center. Watch it and decide for yourself.

From my perspective, Bush's one
shining moment lasted from his megaphone-wielding appearance at
Ground Zero through the first rumblings of the war-to-come in Iraq.
During that period, he provided strong leadership and did a good job
of prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. He's got every right to talk
about his performance during those critical days. Indeed, when you
look at the rest of his sorry record, it's the only thing he's got to
talk about.

Since I don't find the ad morally
repulsive, I guess what I'm left with is the tactical stupidity of
including that one image. Check this
out, from Friday's Boston Globe:

In deciding to include the
Sept. 11 images, Bush advisers said they made a calculated risk
and expected some family members and Democrats to complain
regardless of how sensitively they handled the subject. The only
other alternative, they argued, would have been to ignore the
terrorist attacks altogether - an unacceptable option eight months
before the election.

Sorry, but that's ridiculous. I
think if the campaign had made one change - substituting that image
of Bush at Ground Zero for the flag-draped stretcher - then there
would have been little or no complaining. The bottom line is that
Bush doesn't want the 9/11 families out there denouncing him. By
pushing the imagery just a bit too far, he turned what should have
been a positive for him into a negative.

PULITZER TIME. The Boston
Globe is up for two Pulitzer Prizes, according to a
list
that leaked to Editor & Publisher (via Romenesko).
Ellen Barry, now covering the South for the Los Angeles Times,
is a finalist in beat reporting for her coverage of mental-health
issues.

Patricia Wen is up for the
feature-writing award for "Barbara's
Story," the tale of a
dysfunctional single mother who is persuaded to place her two sons in
foster care. (And by the way, I know the Pulitzers don't work this
way, but Suzanne Kreiter's photos are just as important to the story
as Wen's writing.)

CORRECTION OF THE WEEK. And
it's only Monday! This
appeared in Sunday's New York Times:

An article in Arts &
Leisure on May 4, 1997, about Pat Boone's venture into heavy-metal
music omitted attribution for a critic who said Mr. Boone's album
"Pat Boone in a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy" was "an affront
to everybody who would consider heavy metal a serious musical
form." The comment, from Andy Secher, editor of Hit Parader
magazine, appeared in the March 31, 1997, issue of Insight
magazine. A request for an acknowledgment went astray at The Times
and was renewed last week by the writer of the Insight article,
John Berlau.

Not quite seven years, but better
late than never.

IT'S OFFICIAL: BARNICLE'S
BACK. The Boston Herald today announces
that Mike Barnicle will write a twice-weekly column beginning
tomorrow. Publisher Pat Purcell says, "It's not every day that you
have an opportunity to hire a newspaper legend."

Actually, the Herald could
have hired Barnicle any time during the past five-plus years. It's
just that, until now, the paper's standards were too high.

Friday, March 05, 2004

Barnicle to write for
Herald. It was nearly six years ago that the Boston
Herald reported that then-Boston Globe columnist
Mike
Barnicle had lifted
one-liners from a George Carlin book. Within weeks,
Barnicle was gone amid accusations of fabrication and plagiarism -
charges that he denied, but that he never adequately
explained.

Well, what goes around comes
around. Because now comes word that new editorial director Ken
Chandler is on the verge of announcing that Barnicle will be brought
in as a Herald columnist. The announcement is said to be
scheduled for Monday, although that could be moved up since it's
apparent that the entire Boston media world already knows about
it.

Barnicle's first column is
supposedly scheduled for Tuesday. No word on whether he'll be a staff
member or a freelancer, or if he'll write once, twice, or more a
week. The guess here is that he'll freelance so that he
can keep doing his show
on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM). Perhaps he can be persuaded at least to give
up his low-energy Sunday
column in the New York
Daily News.

No doubt Andy Costello
did much during the past year to keep Chandler from bringing in
Barnicle, a move that had been rumored since last summer. Last week,
of course, Costello was moved out of the editor's job. This week,
here's Mike!

The staff began finding out about
the impending move on Thursday. Media Log's sources suggest there is
considerable unhappiness about bringing in an aging hack at a time
when the mantra is supposedly all about attracting younger
readers.

As for whether that discontent will
extend to anything more than grumbling, Monday should be a good
indication.

Did too! Here's the lead of
an Associated Press dispatch
that moved yesterday: "Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole said
Thursday he did not intend to equate a vote against President Bush to
a vote for Adolf Hitler, but stuck by recent comments that a Bush
loss would be a win for Osama bin Laden."

Here is what Cole actually said,
according to his own spokeswoman: "What do you think Hitler would
have thought if Roosevelt would've lost the election in 1944? He
would have thought American resolve was
[weakening]."

Here is what Cole says he really
meant: "What I am saying is that in a time of war, if our commander
in chief is defeated in an election, our adversary will regard that
as a triumph."

By Cole's own admission, he said
that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for bin Laden. (The actual
quote: "[I]f George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden
wins the election.") And by any reasonable person's interpretation,
Cole also said that a vote for Kerry is a vote for Hitler.

You may recall that Republican
National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie recently went
bananas when MoveOn.org
mistakenly posted a video contest entry that compared Bush to Hitler,
even though website co-founder Wes Boyd took it down and apologized almost
immediately.

Now some Democrats are calling on
Cole to apologize. Please. His constituents ought to demand that he
resign.

Thursday, March 04, 2004

The (ahem) inside track on the
Herald.Not much good news coming out of Wingo Square
these days. Click here
for my update on the Boston Herald in the post-Andy Costello
era.

One good move, though: the paper
has shifted columnist Howard
Manly to the op-ed page.
Manly's stuff tends to get lost inside the Herald's
hyperkinetic news hole. This should give him some new
readers.

New in this week's
Phoenix. In addition to my Herald update, I've got
a piece
on how John Kerry can survive the Republicans' flying monkeys in the
run-up to the Democratic National Convention.

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Selling out his own
daughter. Business is business, but even Vito Corleone was good
to his kids. Which is why I'm so appalled, if not surprised, that
Dick Cheney would sell out his own daughter on gay marriage.
Says
the vice-president: "The
president's taken the clear position that he supports a
constitutional amendment. I support him."

Now, I suppose it's possible that
you could have a child who's gay or lesbian, that you could oppose
marriage rights on religious or philosophical grounds or whatever,
and you could still love that child. But Cheney, as we know, has
actually changed his position in order to get on the right
side of George W. Bush's panderfest. Have he and his daughter, Mary
Cheney, talked about this? For that matter, do they still
talk?

The fact of the matter is
we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for
everybody. We don't get to choose, and shouldn't be able to choose
and say, "You get to live free, but you don't." And I think that
means that people should be free to enter into any kind of
relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one else's
business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in
that regard.

The next step, then, of course,
is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some
kind of official sanction, if you will, of the relationship, or if
these relationships should be treated the same way a conventional
marriage is. That's a tougher problem. That's not a slam
dunk.

I think the fact of the
matter, of course, is that matter is regulated by the states. I
think different states are likely to come to different
conclusions, and that's appropriate. I don't think there should
necessarily be a federal policy in this area.

I try to be open-minded about it
as much as I can, and tolerant of those relationships. And like
Joe, I also wrestle with the extent to which there ought to be
legal sanction of those relationships. I think we ought to do
everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of
relationships people want to enter into.

Andrew Sullivan, for some reason,
tries to throw Cheney a lifeline, arguing
that Cheney said he supports the president, not the amendment. To
which I say, if Cheney is parsing his words as carefully as Sullivan
thinks he is, then his performance is all the more
shameful.

A Corleone line that Cheney won't
be using: "Why do you come to me on the day of my daughter's
wedding?"

Quote of the day. "Just last
week he [George W. Bush] proposed to amend the Constitution
of the United States for political purposes. He has no right to
misuse the most precious document in our history in an effort to
divide this nation and to distract us from our goals." - John Kerry
during his victory
speech last
night.

Strong stuff. Too bad Kerry
fails
to show the same reverence for the Massachusetts Constitution, which
he favors amending for the sole purpose of getting an election-year
monkey off his back.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

A bad night for gay
marriage. Democrat Angus McQuilken, to everyone's surprise,
appears likely to lose
to Republican Scott Brown in the special Massachusetts Senate
election to replace McQuilken's former boss, Cheryl
Jacques.

Jacques left to become head of the
Human Rights Campaign, a gay-and-lesbian-rights organization.
McQuilken strongly supports same-sex marriage; Brown is an opponent,
and has gotten a lot of help from Governor Mitt Romney.

Rightly or wrongly (and, sadly, I
suspect rightly) this race is going to be looked at as a referendum
on gay marriage. This wasn't even supposed to have been close.
Legislators are going to pay a lot of attention to this on March 11,
when they resume the constitutional convention to consider an
amendment banning gay marriage.

Maggots of the media. A
wonderful phrase for you old-time Boston political junkies. And it
fits!

I'm not sure whether this is good
or bad, but Wonkette
has the same take on Elisabeth Bumiller as Media Log. She
writes:
"She just turned in what may be the worst debate performance since
Nixon sweated through his makeup." There's something about a kitten
being strangled, too.

Actually, no, we don't. The reasons
are many, and have been on display for quite some time
now.

The giving of the green. No
doubt Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran hates the press today.
The Boston Globe's Raphael Lewis reports
on some mighty strange donations.

In December, according to Lewis,
Finneran donated $24,500 to the Massachusetts Democratic Party. The
party then turned around and donated $26,000 to 10 House members who
have been loyal to Mr. Speaker on some contentious issues.

What may have been going on was
that Finneran took advantage of a legal loophole to make campaign
donations to his supporters far in excess of what he could give via
the direct route.

As it stands, the story is
incomplete, but Media Log looks forward to the follow-up.

The end of the beginning.
John Kerry stands an excellent chance of carrying all 10 states
today, according to the final tracking polls. Click here
for the Real Clear Politics roundup; here
for Zogby.

The Kerry campaign is known to be
concerned about Georgia, where the lead over John Edwards is narrow,
and the Minnesota
caucuses. There's also a
chanced that Vermont will reward its former governor, Howard Dean,
with a symbolic victory. But Edwards now seems unlikely to carry
Ohio, where his populist message has some appeal.

Will Edwards quit
tonight?

As for what's next, Media Log does
not often agree with Mickey Kaus. But if you look at his
piece today as things to
worry about rather than as a blanket indictment, I think you'll find
that Kaus has pretty much nailed it.

Monday, March 01, 2004

"Are you a liberal?" Only if
God's on our side! So what did we learn from the 1297th and
possibly final debate of the Democratic presidential primary season?
That journalist-questioners are endlessly rude, and hinder more than
they help. That John Edwards is pretty effective when he goes on the
attack. That Al Sharpton's and Dennis Kucinich's demands for equal
treatment were a whole lot easier to listen to back before they'd
been soundly rejected by primary voters and caucus-goers in every
state in which they've run. (Okay, Kucinich did all right in Hawaii.)
And that John Kerry isn't going to fill anyone with spasms of
excitement, but that there's virtually no way he can blow the
nomination at this point.

Yesterday's debate, sponsored by CBS News and the New
York Times, was particularly frenetic because it only lasted for
an hour. Dan Rather, at least, was polite in trying to move things
along; and I wanted to cheer when he told Sharpton that "I think you
will agree, the voters have spoken." But Andrew Kirtzman, of WCBS-TV,
in New York, seemed clueless. And Times reporter Elisabeth
Bumiller was a constant distraction, interrupting before anyone could
even get out a fragment of an answer, and continually trying to push
her agenda.

Item: In discussing yesterday's
departure of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first
democratically elected leader in that country's history, Bumiller at
one point asked, "But no one says he's a good president, so why is it
so terrible he's gone? You've all agreed on that." As her own
paper's editorial page puts
it this morning, Aristide
left because of pressure "from a Bush administration too willing to
ignore democratic legitimacy in order to allow the removal of a
leader it disliked and distrusted."

You know, the Democrats all agree
that George W. Bush isn't a good president, either, and he wasn't
even democratically elected. What do you suppose Bumiller's response
would be if one of the candidates called for Haitian troops to remove
Bush from office?

Item: Bumiller's intellectually
insulting interrogation of Kerry as to whether he is a "liberal."
Roll
the tape:

BUMILLER: The National
Journal, a respected, nonideologic [sic]
publication covering Congress, as you both know, has just rated
you, Senator Kerry, number one, the most liberal senator in the
Senate. You're [she gestures to Edwards] number
four. How can you hope to win with this kind of
characterization, in this climate?

KERRY: Because it's a
laughable characterization. It's absolutely the most
ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life.

BUMILLER: Are you a
liberal?

KERRY: Let me just
...

BUMILLER: Are you a
liberal?

KERRY: ... to the
characterization. I mean, look, labels are so silly in
American politics. I was one of the first Democrats in the
United States Senate in 1985 to join with Fritz Hollings in
deficit reduction. Now, does that make me a
conservative? I fought to put 100,000 police officers on the
streets of America. Am I a conservative?

BUMILLER: But, Senator
Kerry, the question is ...

KERRY: I know. You
don't let us finish answering questions.

BUMILLER: You're in New
York.

Are you a liberal? Are you a
liberal? Are you a liberal? I would expect this from Rush
Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, not one of the lead reporters at the paper
of record. Pathetic. (By the way: Kerry is a liberal!)

Item: Dan Rather began the
proceedings by asking the candidates about their "spirituality" or
"religiosity." It was a little weird - Rather, after all, is a little
weird - but I thought it was within bounds, since all four of them
have brought up the G-word at one time or another. And, actually,
their answers were at least somewhat revealing.

But then, in the closing minutes,
Bumiller came back to it - this time putting it in the context of
President Bush, who, she claimed, "has made quite clear in his
speeches that he feels God is on America's side." (A fair
interpretation, perhaps, but has Bush ever said anything quite that
crude? I don't think so.)

She then asked: "Really quick, is
God on America's side?" Roll that around on your tongue, in your
mind, for a moment. Really quick, is God on America's side? Is
this what we need from the people who are supposed to be explaining
the presidential campaign to us? A sneering jab at Bush, followed by
an invitation to the Democrats to make horse's asses of themselves?
Really quick?

Kerry, understandably, looked
stricken at the vacuousness of Bumiller's question. He fumbled around
for a moment and didn't say much of anything. Edwards had such a good
answer that you couldn't help but wonder whether he knew it was
coming, observing that Abraham Lincoln once refused to pray that God
was on our side - but that "I'll join you in a prayer that we're on
God's side."

Good recovery. But that doesn't
excuse Bumiller's cheap stunt.

Kerry supports federal benefits
for gay couples. On Friday, I asked
whether Edwards had moved ahead of Kerry in promising to extend
federal marriage rights - though not the word "marriage" - to gay and
lesbian couples that marry in states that choose to allow same-sex
marriage. Kerry answered that yesterday, saying at one point, "That's
why I am for civil union. That's why I'm for partnership
rights. That's why I'm for even the federal extension, with
respect to tax code and other rights."

With that, I would argue that Kerry
is superior to Edwards on gay and lesbian rights, since Kerry's
support of civil unions is more definitive than Edwards's. Neither
man supports same-sex marriage.

Rod Paige, meet Mike
Barnicle. Tim Francis-Wright catches
WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Mike Barnicle referring to two
Academy Award nominees with foreign-sounding names - one of whom is
(gasp!) Iranian - as "terrorists." One would expect outrage, but I
suppose that would be too much coming from a station that lets Jay
Severin refer to illegal immigrants as "wetbacks" and Arabs as
"towelheads." UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: The original item appeared in
Saturday's Globe. Francis-Wright gives proper attribution, but
I misunderstood the sequence.

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.